“Very likely,” Geary said. The distraction had come too close to working, though that was because the Dancers had thrown an unexpected variable into the situation. He touched his comm controls. “All units in First Fleet. Immediate execute reduce velocity to point zero zero three light speed.” Another control. “Emissary Charban—”
The usually controlled Charban looked about ready himself to explode with frustration. “They just keep echoing back to us!” he said. “We say danger ahead, and they say danger ahead, then we do it again!”
“I think the Dancers are trying to warn us,” Geary said. “They’re not echoing. They’re agreeing with what you’re saying.”
“They’re—?” Charban visibly quivered as he fought to regain control. “That means I can stop trying.”
“Yes. But I want you to tell them something else. Please inform the Dancers that we are drastically reducing our speed due to the threats in front of the fleet. Tell them they must not precede us to the jump point.”
“Drastically reducing speed?” Charban asked. “What velocity does that mean? Never mind. I can’t convey it to the Dancers even if you told me. I’ll ask them to match our big reduction in speed. They can do that easily.”
Dauntless’s thrusters fired, bringing her bow over and around before her main propulsion lit off and began dropping the ship’s speed dramatically. The structure of Dauntless groaned audibly under the strain, but Desjani, her eyes on the strain meters displaying hull-stress readings, watched them with a reassuring lack of visible concern.
“Nine hundred kilometers a second?” she asked. “I could swim through space faster than that. Why are you slowing down the fleet that much? I thought you’d dodge the minefield.”
“Too hard,” Geary said. “We have to assume the minefield is right across the entrance to the jump exit. They couldn’t keep a minefield that close to a jump point for long, but from the prior attacks on us, they obviously knew we would soon arrive at Sobek. We’ll get down real slow, crawling along, which will allow the fleet’s sensors to spot every mine in our path and our weapons to take out the mines one by one. Our warships will blow a hole in that Syndic minefield big enough for the entire fleet to waltz through.”
“While they watch?” Desjani grinned. “They’re going to be real unhappy at us thumbing our noses at them like that.”
“And we’ll come out the jump exit at Simur still moving very slow,” Geary added. “That’s important. The Syndics are setting traps based on the paths we have to use and our normal methods of operation. If there’s a trap set up at Simur, they might have prepared for us evading immediately upon exit. They might have prepared for other actions we could take. The one thing they won’t be prepared for is us going at such a slow velocity because we never do that.”
“Not until now,” Desjani agreed.
“Power core overload imminent,” Lieutenant Castries said.
The Dancers, along with the escape pod, were still within the blast radius, but as Geary watched, the six Dancer ships leaped ahead, tearing past the escape pod and into the clear.
The freighter, now less than a light-minute ahead of the fleet, exploded as its power core overloaded, producing a burst of energy as well as a sphere of fragments ranging from dust specks to large chunks, all fouling the vision of the fleet’s sensors. As the globe of the explosion rapidly expanded, the escape pod reached the edge of the danger zone, taking enough impacts for damage to be visible.
“Good work on that,” Desjani admitted grudgingly. “They timed it perfectly, so the escape pod got hit but not destroyed, making quick rescue seem all the more critical.”
“And it looks like the Dancers did always know what they were doing. We’ve been breaking our backs worrying about protecting them, but then they went out of their way to protect us from a threat they saw.”
Desjani grimaced. “I want to feel like the senior partner when it comes to the Dancers. I’ve got this feeling that they consider themselves the senior partner, though. Older and wiser than us dumb humans.”
“I’ll ask Charban about that,” Geary said, realizing that the idea bothered him, too. It’s one thing to accept powers beyond human comprehension that know more than we do, but another thing entirely to accept another living creature as superior to us in any way. Has Charban picked up any signs of superior attitudes in the Dancers? Or would we even recognize superior attitudes in something so different from us?
But now was not the time for that discussion. His attention needed to remain focused on events outside of Dauntless. And Charban deserved a bit of a rest after the recent attempted-communication-with-aliens fiasco.
Dauntless didn’t feel any different when traveling at point zero zero three light speed. Space didn’t offer obvious signs of slower or faster movement, the sort of things you would experience on a planet, like air turbulence and noise or nearby objects whose own motion relative to yours would change as your speed did. The battle cruiser felt exactly the same as she did when moving at a velocity of point zero five, or point one, or point two light speed. Endless space outside of Dauntless’s hull looked the same. But on Geary’s display, the speed vector for the fleet had shrunk to a tiny stub, and that reduction in velocity had thrown off the calculations of those preparing this trap. The fragments of the exploded freighter would keep spreading, their density thinning with every cubic meter the sphere of wreckage expanded. By the time the Alliance warships actually reached the region of the explosion, there should be very little hindrance to their sensors.
“Nice,” Desjani approved.
“Thank you, Captain.”
“But don’t get complacent. There might be a trap within this trap.” She hit her comm controls. “Master Chief Gioninni, congratulations.”
“Excuse me, Captain?”
“You called it, Master Chief. Now I need to know what sort of fallback you might have created in case the mines failed.”
Gioninni sounded dubious. “A fallback to the fallback to the diversion?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Captain, I have no idea. There’s no room or time left for them to hit us with something else in this star system. Now, the next star system. I’d keep an eye out there. But you’d need someone with a lot better, um, strategizing mind than mine to come up with another trap here before we jump.”
Desjani smiled, though it was hard to tell whether that was because of Gioninni’s statement or because the fleet’s ships were beginning to spot mines and detonate them using hell-lance shots. “No one’s better than you at that particular type of strategizing, Master Chief. You just out-thought some Syndics.”
“Well, hell, Captain, that ain’t nothing. Syndics are as dumb as dirt. That’s why they’re Syndics.”
“Good point, Master Chief. Stay out of trouble.” Desjani ended the call and leaned back in her seat, grimacing even though the destruction of mines was happening with greater frequency as the fleet moved into the minefield at a velocity that in space terms qualified as plodding. “If I never see this star system again, it will still be too soon.”
“We’ll never have any reason to come back here,” Geary said.
“We never expected to have to come here in the first place,” she reminded him. “Hey, I just thought of something.”
“What?” Geary searched his mind frantically for any possible threat he might have missed, any option be should have considered, any—
“The jump pool,” she explained. “You slowed us down so much, it’ll throw the jump pool off completely.”